


the hawthorn wand

by spikenard



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-War, Queer Themes, Werewolf Draco Malfoy, alternate universe: some people lived/different people died, dis/ability, magical houses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-30 05:16:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20809145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spikenard/pseuds/spikenard
Summary: Hawthorn wands may be particularly suited to healing magic, but they are also adept at curses, and I have generally observed that the hawthorn wand seems most at home with a conflicted nature, or with a witch or wizard passing through a period of turmoil.





	the hawthorn wand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).

> this isn’t so much a fic as it is a sandbox i sometimes play in, just for fun and just for me! but Seef liked the concept and wanted me to polish some up for her birthday. hbd, mariette! sorry it’s late!
> 
> also i wrote most of this on my phone so let me know if you find typos or awkward edits. character and pairing tags will be updated as they become relevant. 
> 
> this fic (sandbox?) conceptually owes quite a bit to every hp longfic i grew up with, the ones I loved more than canon – most especially to maya’s quality of mercy which still Resonates with me the way few other things do. it also owes a lot to the hp longfics i grew up and grew out of, and plays fast and loose with canon where i think that makes more sense and (more importantly) is more fun.
> 
> this thematically is about werewolves, and disability, and existing in a body, and hamfisted Diversity Symbolism, and about draco being both gay and a werewolf, and about gender in hp. that being said, your standard postwar draco fic warnings apply: partially or not-at-all re-evaluated bigoted worldviews, sad boy angst (though hopefully this fic does not verge into making excuses for the inexcusable). obviously, general content warnings around homo/transphobia, body horror, uh war crimes?, and eugenics also apply. 
> 
> if you need more specific warnings before reading, feel free to contact me on [tumblr](http://augustales.tumblr.com/)!

“I really don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation,” Aunt Andromeda said severely, as though he was some sort of blithering incompetent. As if he had done this to himself on some sort of whim, following the latest spring trends. Draco fit the flat side of his tongue between his flat molars to bite down, and wondered when his canines were going to sharpen, when the changes were going to take him.

Aunt Andromeda was still talking, and Draco was listening, really, he was – one didn’t grow up in a household like his without listening whenever a relative spoke, even a blood-traitor aunt. His mother had sent him to her, and besides, she had been a Black.

But she was only saying things Draco already knew. She was speaking to her husband: that anti-werewolf legislation was on the rise, that Greyback hadn’t faced trial yet (Draco didn’t shudder. He didn’t.) and that things would only get worse, for people like him. Draco couldn’t tell if she meant Death Eaters, or werewolves in general, or Death Eater werewolves, or himself in specific, or Greyback in specific, but it was all he could think about. Being lumped in with that thing made his skin crawl.

Draco unclenched his fists, and placed his hands flat on his thighs. Her husband hummed, agreeing with her, as his wand moved in slow, gentle sweeps, diagnostic spells pulsing over Draco’s skin in waves.

Draco bit back a shudder, but the hair on the back of his neck was standing up. He was tired, and starving, and he felt sick. His arm throbbed; when he opened his eyes again, he could see blood on his shirtsleeve. Aunt Andromeda’s husband, kneeling before him, peeled his sleeve back, and inspected the gory mess.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Aunt Andromeda’s husband said. His voice was gruff, but he had a broad, Hufflepuffish face, and a surprisingly deft touch with his diagnostic spells. He’d caught a few nasty, barbed pieces of magic, and was now tugging them out of Draco’s arms with impatient flicks of his wand.

Draco gritted his teeth. The removal was leaving his arm a ruined mess. With any other healer he’d be furious, threaten to report them to St. Mungo’s for patient abuse. He imagined doing that now, his reputation in tatters, for this – a werewolf bite interacting poorly with a Dark Mark – and nearly started to laugh.

“Likely just a curse interaction,” Ted informed Draco, as the last few wriggling resentful worms of magic burrowed out through Draco’s skin and shriveled up into nothing under the gentle movements of Ted’s wand, as if that weren’t obvious. “The residue from your Mark. You can expect the wound to stay open, and to experience persistent bleeding. Don’t take blood replenishers while healing from an injury like this. Change your bandages regularly. You’ll want to be careful to avoid infection.”

He tapped his wand sharply against Draco’s forearm, and a few strips of torn flesh twisted themselves back into shape; he tapped it again, and a clean white _sphendone_ wrapped itself around Draco's arm, wrist to elbow. Draco gazed down at it, blankly, the crisp white expanse of it, the faint dark blotches already seeping through.

“At this point it just needs to be kept clean and under pressure. See me again if it doesn’t scar properly after your first moon,” the man added, as though that might be a reassurance, instead of a horrifying reminder of exactly what was left of Draco’s life. Kindly meant and poorly cast, Draco thought, and went back to staring straight ahead, past Aunt Andromeda, who had fallen silent, and moved to place a hand on her husband’s shoulder.

The man was certainly agreeable enough. He supposed one had to be, if Aunt Andromeda was anything like his mother, or like Aunt Bellatrix. If one wasn’t of the caliber to meet a woman like that at her own level, to push her, like his parents had pushed each other, agreeability was a necessity. Before – before, before the Dark Lord had returned, his parents had been devastating, a perfect team: the ideal pureblood marriage.

That was what came of lowering yourself: he had never met anyone who had actually married out, before, not personally. Certainly not family. He understood, now - the ideology was well on its way to gauche, but he saw where it had come from: there were consequences. Here it was: outsiders didn’t understand what he was, now. What a monster was. And loving someone who was willing to be kind to monsters was a weakness.

Any pureblood worth their salt wouldn’t have agreed to see him, in this state, things being what they were. Potter having, against all odds, triumphed after all; Draco finding himself, against all odds, pathetically grateful that he had.

“Thank you,” Draco said, when Andromeda’s husband was finished.

He clapped Draco on the knee and stood. “You can stay in Dora’s room for a few days,” he said. “If you need a place to stay.”

Draco blinked up at him. Before he could formulate a response - did the man think he had nowhere else to go? - Aunt Andromeda was talking.

“Ted,” she said, and Draco recognized that tone of voice; his mother used it, too. And: ah. So that was his name; Draco had never seen it before, or even heard it spoken.

Hastily, he put in, “No, no. Of course not, I wouldn’t dream of imposing,” and stood. He swayed when he did - horrible, the exhaustion and the blood loss and replenisher fatigue; the healer was right, he shouldn’t have taken one, but there had been so much blood.

Ted put a hand on Draco’s elbow to support him. This was the most human contact Draco had had in weeks. Months, even. Aunt Andromeda, though, had taken a step back from Draco.

“I’m alright,” Draco said, cautiously removing his elbow from Ted’s grip. “Thank you. I’ll just be going–”

Aunt Andromeda pursed her lips. She nodded at him, said, “Draco,” and swept out of the room.

Ted asked, “Do you need help making it to the Floo?”

Draco shook his head. He wanted to go home.

“Listen,” Ted said, and Draco looked up at him. “If you need Wolfsbane, let me know.”

“Wolfsbane is illegal,” Draco said, automatically. That had been one of the last charges tacked on during his trial: that he had been a brewer of illegal potions.

During the last stretches of the war, the Dark Lord’s wolves had used Wolfsbane to prepare targeted attacks. To strategize. Draco had once heard Greyback had said it took the fun out of the hunt. He’d never asked which of the wolves used it.

The puppet ministry had made the potion illegal. It was just the law-abiding types who used it, really, in any significant amounts. It had never been popular; it was expensive long-term - much more so now, with the ingredients still restricted. It was also fiendishly complex to brew, and reactive.

The health effects of monthly feeding a werewolf a potion whose primary active ingredient was wolfsbane had never been studied. At the time, Draco had found this a comfort.

Ted was still looking at him with the same implacable gaze possessed by the empty-headed but elegant red-eared hounds Crabbe’s family had raised: one which suggested that the world would certainly rearrange itself in such a way that treats would present themselves.

“It’s hard to find a full dose’s worth,” Ted said, evenly. “But I can get you at least some.” There was no concern for plausible deniability, or that Draco was a werewolf and a Malfoy besides. Ted Tonks was a Healer, and apparently that was all that mattered. More than his blood relation to the man's wife, apparently.

Draco looked away. He could feel his ears burning. Only of the people here was a _dog. _It certainly wasn’t Ted.

“I’ll handle it myself,” he said.

“The first change is the worst,” Ted said, warningly. “Sedation helps.”

Draco, somewhat desperate to end this conversation, said, “No, that’s alright. I’m sure it’ll be – well, it'll be quite unpleasant. But I'll manage.”

“Do you have somewhere to go for the change?” Ted asked, Hufflepuffishly relentless. “Not that I recommend registering, but if you’re taking the change unmedicated you’ll want to be sure you’ve got somewhere safe to go. For you as well as for others.”

“I’ll be quite alright,” Draco said, his voice sounding thin in his ears. Ted finally acknowledged Draco’s yearning gaze at the pot of powder and held it out for Draco to take a pinch.

Draco did, arm throbbing as it moved.

“Malfoy Manor,” Draco said, with what he hoped was great dignity, and stepped into the flames.

###

The Aurors, overextended in the immediate aftermath, had done a sloppy job clearing out the Manor. The most obvious areas – of course the drawing room and its cellar, but also the great hall, his father’s study – the hallways full of clean and empty squares of wallpaper where portraits had once hung – all of these had been stripped bare. Those rooms had been _cleared_, as the grim-faced Auror who had met Draco at the gates had put it, of curses and Dark artifacts and every item they contained, whether they’d originated with the Dark Lord and his followers or from the Malfoy estate. Some of the artifacts the Aurors had pilfered dated to the Norman conquest.

The Aurors had obviously been planning to establish those rooms as safe zones – they made up the vast majority of the first floor, had been where the Dark Lord’s presence had been strongest. The Hall was large enough to establish Portkey zones, if they caught something nasty in one of the smaller rooms, triggered a curse waiting in some hidden nook or cranny. It was a sensible plan, methodical and thorough, a last attempt at by-the-book work once it was too late to matter.

Only then, Potter had pushed Draco’s trial through, and the Aurors had had to scramble; they’d gone from having months, possibly years, to dig through the Dark Lord’s abandoned headquarters, to having three days. They must have thought there was no chance at acquittal, because they hadn’t changed their pace or plan at all.

Draco didn’t blame them. He hadn’t thought there was any chance, either.

They’d only gotten halfway done with his father’s study before the court ruled him remanded to his legal residence. No doubt the Wizengamot had been hoping an Auror would mistake him - ha! - for a Death Eater, and that a stray curse would off him in the night.

Draco had been living here all year, though, and hadn’t died yet. He certainly wasn’t going to die just because it would be convenient for the DMLE.

That didn’t mean the bare walls and empty rooms of the Manor didn’t fill him with prickling unease.

The house-elves – whichever ones the Dark Lord hadn’t killed, or that hadn’t been eaten by Nagini or savaged by some stray wolf – had shut the kitchen rooms up months ago and were holed up in there. He didn’t even know how many were left. A tray appeared in Draco’s bedroom several times a day, with food, and disappeared when he cleared his plate. Otherwise, they kept to themselves; he hadn’t seen them in months. Draco didn’t blame them, either.

He stepped out of the fireplace into the bare Floo room and shook out his robes. He sighed and stepped into the Great Hall. His footsteps echoed all the way up the Grand Staircase to the second floor; the Aurors had even taken the stair carpet.

###

Draco got to his room and jabbed his wand at the door. He still wasn’t finished disassembling the layered wards and alarms he’d put on his room over the last months. They’d kept interlopers out during the Manor’s occupation, but certainly a determined assailant – or a trained Auror – shouldn’t have had any trouble.

The wards shuddered. He jabbed again; really, they should respond to his intent, he thought. They _should_.

The wards shuddered again, and then shimmered like a spray of water and dissolved. Draco darted through the door to his room and felt the wards spring back up behind him. He peered over his own shoulder; they’d singed the back of his robes.

He struggled out of the robes and flung them onto a battered armchair he’d rescued from the reading room after Greyback’s first full moon at the Manor; they disappeared, presumably for mending.

Draco pulled on an old nightshirt, tatty at the collar and lace falling yellowed at the cuffs to cover his knuckles. He drummed his fingernails on the rolltop cover of his writing desk. He hadn’t opened it since the trial, except to make sure everything was still where he’d left it.

The night after his trial, when he’d returned to the Manor and ordered the Aurors out, the wards on his room had seemed completely untouched.

They had been, of course; when he inspected the spells, he could tell that the Aurors had simply pulled them aside like a heavy curtain and walked through the door unhindered. They’d put the wards back before leaving because they’d heard Draco was on wand restriction and wouldn’t be able to perform the spells required to get back through them. It was a nice punishment, a nasty insult masked as politeness. Draco almost hadn’t been angry; it was the sort of nasty little punishment he'd have been proud to come up with. Now it just made him tired. He’d had to resort to bleeding on the doorknob like a squib cousin.

The Aurors hadn’t gotten into the desk, at least, though they had seized half his regular wardrobe, Merlin only knew why. Probably spite: the clothes were just hanging there, and they’d been easy to grab. They’d also pulled the seascape portrait off the wall – it hadn’t been worth much, but Draco had always loved it – and taken his bed-hangings.

He pulled the chair out from the desk and pulled out a quill and parchment, and then settled in.

###

Draco didn’t have any idea what Aunt Andromeda had been up to since she fell out with the family as a whole. Well, he knew she’d married. Obviously. He thought she’d had a child, or herself was somehow in with Dumbledore’s crowd, but he wasn’t sure. He’d thought her closer to neutral than, apparently, she was. That made this tricky.

Father was still in Azkaban, of course; Draco didn’t expect him to be released for longer than it took to try him. Mother was also in prison, awaiting trial, but she was being held elsewhere, one of the slapdash low-security cells the New Ministry had thrown together in Wales, for the low-level collaborators and petty criminals. Azkaban was overcrowded.

They’d had the whole family in Azkaban until Draco’s trial, which they’d pushed through with extreme haste. Draco had had no idea why he was being thrown in front of the Wizengamot so precipitously. He had been terrified they would make an example of him, and only moreso when a guard told that Potter was planning to testify.

Then the trial itself. Draco had been pale-faced the whole time, fighting to stop his hands from shaking, dazed by the Veritaserum hangover. Potter spoke for him, barely looking resentful about it at all, though Draco couldn’t imagine he’d been pleased to do so. 

He hadn’t believed he’d gotten off until he saw Granger’s face in the audience, glowing with rage, Weasley next to her, Potter’s grim resignation. Until his word was good enough to have the Aurors thrown out of the Manor. He could still scarcely believe it. Draco had gotten off with a fine the size of the Bones estate, the confiscation of the Lestrange properties (though not their vaults), time served in Azkaban, and five years of wand restriction – a moot point, as Draco's wand had been uncooperative for months.

Mother had been moved to Wales in the uproar, while Draco was busy trying to keep the Manor’s wards from falling down around his ears with fourth year spells, and then getting mauled by rogue werewolves. He'd been busy.

By all accounts, Mother was a model inmate. She was allowed to write to Draco weekly, though of course her mail was monitored, as were his return letters. He was even allowed to visit her, but Draco wasn’t sure what sort of Dark-Creature-detection spells they had on the gaol, and he was avoiding the werewolf registry.

Draco’s quill was hovering over the page. He tipped back in his chair, on two legs. The chair creaked. His mother would have frowned at him, and maybe shot a spell at him to make the chair tip him out, but she wasn’t here. He sat back down anyway to open his desk back up again – not the roll-top, but the drawers. Everything was where he had left it.

He unset his quill and the parchment, tucking them back under the rolltop. He bent and took his cauldron out of the bottom drawer, and just about managed to unshrink it, though it took enough concentration that he nearly decided not to go through with this stupid, stupid idea.

Wolfsbane was volatile, and only moreso in large batches. Brewing a dose for one werewolf to last a single moon would, at best, leave burns that would _only_ disfigure _if_ left untreated. Draco had brewed double batches for days at a time every month. He didn’t bother, this time, just prepped for a triple dose, and then a second, and then a third.

###

He set up in the Great Hall, at least; he wasn’t an idiot. Reckless, foolish, _Gryffindorish_, but still sensible enough to throw on an ugly but protective overrobe; he even dug up his good silver potions knife and scratched a rough circle into the scarred floors so an explosion wouldn’t shatter all the mirrors. And then he brewed: it was easy.

Draco had more experience making this potion than, quite possibly, any brewer alive. He could have done it in his sleep. He’d always had good technique, which was why he’d been the one to brew in the first place, and there was no one to bother him in this abandoned Manor: no one banging on the door to his room growling about delay, no concern for his mother’s safety. 

He had worried a lot, then, and it was strange to have comparatively little to worry about now: his mother, of course. The coming moon. His father. The house. But those were old worries, nearly comfortable. Even his heedless terrified panic at the thought of the coming full moon was very nearly ordinary, part of the background hum of his life. He had even worried about Professor Lupin, once or twice, when he was measuring out the dosages for the Dark Lord’s pack: worried that he’d take sugar in his tea, worried that he might be a spy, worried that the other werewolves might know he was a spy, worried that Potter didn’t.

Lupin was the first werewolf Draco had met and had left a stubbornly good impression, difficult to shake even after Draco had watched him fight with one of Greyback’s lieutenants over the severed fingers of some muggle Aunt Bellatrix had killed. The man had always favored Potter in class, of course, but what was new about that. Draco wondered what he was up to, now. Whether he was awaiting trial or an Order of Merlin for outstanding services to the war effort.

###

He finished brewing the first batch at just past nine. Once it was bottled, a tray appeared at his elbow, quickly followed by a folding-stand, onto which it gently settled. The elves hadn’t sent trays anywhere but his room before. He supposed him brewing must come as a relief.

He ate his dinner slowly. It was fish and potatoes, simple fare like the elves had been producing since the war ended. But tonight, the fish was bream, freshly caught, and roasted simply with dill and lemon, and the potatoes had been baked til they were crisp. When he’d cleaned his plate down to the bones, he sat back from the tray and said, “Thank you.”

The tray vanished. Draco moved to get back to brewing, but the tray reappeared. It was holding a small bowl of dessert. He took a bite; it was rhubarb clafoutis. This had been his mother’s favorite.

He ate it very slowly. When he set the spoon down, the dish disappeared, and he was presented with a large cup of coffee. “_Thank_ you,” he said, meaning it profoundly, this time. He picked the coffee up and buried his face in the mug; it was strong, and dark, and bitter. He supposed he’d have to stop taking sugar, too, instead of chasing disaster like Lupin always had. He set his mug down and hesitated before taking his hand off the grip.

“If you have any of the clafoutis left, I might try sending some along to Mother tomorrow.”

He let go, and the cup, tray, and stand disappeared with a soft _pop_. He scrubbed an arm over his face and sighed. Back to work.

###

The second batch took him past midnight, though he couldn’t have said by how much, and the third to dawn. He was exhausted, bottling the last dose, and caught a yawn in his throat before it had him spooning the Wolfsbane into his lap.

Draco banished the dregs in his cauldron and slumped back in relief. He almost fell off his stool.

One dose came back with Draco, to his room. The rest he left in the hall, along with his impromptu workstation and the remnants of his ingredients – the roots and greens he’d trimmed, the shells he’d picked out, the chunks he’d fished out of the store-bought packet of powdered knotgrass. That was what came of not harvesting your own ingredients, but Draco hadn’t exactly had the time.

He flipped the shell of his desk back and fished out his quill and parchment. He set his quill to the parchment and began to dictate.

_Aunt Andromeda_ –

and then Draco had no idea what to say. He bit his lip.

He siphoned the ink off the parchment before it could dry, and tried again.

_ Ted – this should help_.

He didn’t sign the letter. Obviously.

Draco realized, then, that he had no idea how to get the Wolfsbane to the Tonks house. He only had access to one slow but small owl, which was out, delivering a letter to Mother or waiting for her reply. The smarter owls had abandoned the Manor, and of course the Dark Lord had enjoyed killing the ones that came in carrying bad news.

He went back downstairs, thinking, folding the letter neatly as he walked. Wolfsbane had to be dosed over multiple nights, which meant the bottles were larger than average, and transporting potions by owl was sometimes risky even with stable brews. He’d only used glass vials, instead of crystal, which meant they might break; his mistake, but he didn’t have crystal to decant into, anyway.

He stood in the great hall, staring at the neat racks of dosages, helpless and frustrated. There was a crack behind him.

“Where is young master Draco needing the potions to be going?” a house-elf squeaked. Draco half-turned; it was Mipsy, who had been the nursery elf. She had served as a Black elf before coming to the Manor; Aunt Bellatrix had hated her. Draco was honestly surprised she was still alive.

“To Ted Tonks,” Draco said, with some relief.

Mipsy didn’t respond. House-elves weren’t owls; they couldn’t find someone they didn’t know.

Draco elaborated, “Andromeda Tonks,” as if Mipsy didn’t know. “They live in London,” he added, weakly, and then: “I think.” He wasn't sure; he only knew their Floo address. He was fairly certain it was true; he knew they lived in a Muggle city, at least, and London at least had a wizarding population. Ted was a healer, too; he might have worked at Mungo’s before the War started.

“Hm,” Mipsy said. Her face held the same stern disappointment in her face as it had the second – and fifth – and tenth time she’d caught Draco stealing his parents’ wands as a child. But she snapped her fingers. She – and the potions – disappeared with a crack.

###

Draco went upstairs, too exhausted to worry any more, jabbed his wand at the door until his door finally, reluctantly, swung open. He shed his overrobe and flung his wand on the nightstand, and then collapsed, face-first, directly into bed.

He slept until nightfall and awoke ravenous. Brewing was about the only thing that would let him stretch his magic, these days, and the expenditure necessary to keep such large batches of Wolfsbane stable had been grueling. He doubted he was capable of so much as a _lumos_.

He rolled over and opened his eyes to an enormous tray, loaded with scrambled eggs and toast, more of last night’s crispy baked potatoes, a plate of kippers instead of bacon, a bowl of fresh strawberries, tender and perfectly ripe, and buttery scones with little pots of marmalade and unsweetened whipped cream. A coffee press was standing on his nightstand, steaming gently and perfectly brewed; it had cream with it, but the sugar bowl was missing.

When he’d finished the coffee – the whole press’ worth more or less squeezed into three cups, filled and then topped up with milk til it sloshed over the rim, and then a dollop of the cream on top. He grabbed for the saucer, and then sat there hunched over his blankets, drinking and refilling his cup until the press was empty and he could think a little. He set his cup and saucer back down on the nightstand.

“Thank you,” Draco said.

A second press appeared. So did a bigger cup; a mug, stoneware, scored all over with what looked like runes but, upon closer inspection, weren’t; Draco had no idea what they were. Draco eyed it warily and decided to let the coffee steep for a bit.

He set at his breakfast instead. He ate it all, the whole tray. He even ate the kippers, and wiped the pot of marmalade out with his fingers before licking them clean.

Sleepily, Draco wiped his sticky fingers on the front of his nightshirt. A hot towel popped into existence on his nightstand, reproachfully. He took it, half-shamed into wiping his hands, and then pressed the warmth against his mouth before scrubbing his whole face with the rough cloth and collapsing back into bed. The towel he dropped onto his chest; it disappeared

“Right,” Draco said. The food at the Manor hadn’t been this good since Father had freed Dobby. Not to say that they hadn’t cooked perfectly; the Malfoy elves were very skilled. It’d certainly been technically proficient, right up until the Dark Lord had moved his troops into the Manor, but it was true: you always could tell when elves weren’t happy with a House.

Draco poured himself some coffee into the mysterious mug; it was enormous. It might have made a decent soup bowl. Some of the carvings around the rim lit up, winding down the handle, and he felt the magic prickle against his palm. Draco drank out of it anyway.

It tasted fine. He sipped. He’d filled the mug rather too full, and now didn’t actually want to work his way through the whole thing.

He sipped some more.

He was stalling.

Finally, Draco knocked back the rest of his mug, and fetched out his bottle of Wolfsbane. He was going to have to divide it out into doses. The potion had, of course, been improved since its invention; Belby had succeeded through wild experimentation, and by rights, Wolfsbane shouldn’t work at all. At best, it should have poisoned the wolf taking it; Draco had read Belby’s research notes. Werewolves had died – Belby wasn’t clear on how many – and still more volunteered for the trials. Pathetic, Draco had thought.

The Wolfsbane modifications had been published and patented in Draco’s fourth year, anonymously, and had caused a stir less, at the time, for their political implications than for the elegance of the formulation. Draco now suspected Snape, as it seemed the sort of project that might have occupied both the man’s masters in the early stages of the war. Before it had started up properly. Snape’d always been excellent at that sort of modification and improvement, too, eking out by inches better stability while brewing or increased potency from potions that had been considered standardized for decades.

Draco had been a competent student, with a firm grasp of theory and the ability to do the simplest modifications himself – crushing rather than dicing, that sort of thing – but Snape had never seemed to like him much, personally, except inasmuch as he helped make Potter’s life more difficult. Fat lot of good that had done him in the end, for all Potter was heralding him a war hero in the papers. 

The standard regime now consisted of three doses in advance of a moon, rather than seven, and while the doses were larger, the overall amount of Wolfsbane necessary for each cycle had been reduced by nearly a third.

Draco poured the potion down his throat, and tried not to think about the fact that he was poisoning himself.


End file.
